August 4, 2018

The U.S. government claimed it met the July 26 deadline to return migrant children to their parents by declaring that over 700 of them were “ineligible” out of the approximately 2,500 separated children. The judge who ordered reunification didn’t swallow the excuse. He ordered the feds to provide “detailed information” about each one and weekly status reports with telephonic conferences until resolutions.

Then DOJ decided it wouldn’t take responsibility for the crisis it caused. Instead, it wanted to dump their problems onto the ACLU who had sued the government for reunification. Last Thursday, the DOJ told a federal judge that they are not responsible for finding the 400+ parents who they deported and can’t be bothered to find. Instead, the DOJ claims, the court should require the ACLU to “fulfill their obligations to their clients.” And the DOJ wants the ACLU to tell them all information about the located parents. The ACLU had already found 12 deported parents but discovered that they were in contact with the government, which had not shared this information with the ACLU.

Yesterday, a judge called DDT’s plan to turn the work over to the ACLU “unacceptable.” The inability “to track and unite … is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration.” He gave the government an August 10 deadline to provide information on separated families to the ACLU. The judge also clearly stated that parents with minor criminal charges cannot be permanently ineligible for reunification. In addition, the judge ordered the government to “identify an individual or a team” to create and implement a procedure for those kids to be reunified with their families because it appears that the government has no plan for the remaining families.

Government officials in charge of the children are so cavalier or ignorant about the miserable conditions in their prisons that one of them, Matthew Albence, claimed that the centers were like “summer camps. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) asked, “You would send your child to these centers?” Jennifer Higgins, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, stammered, “I—I—it’s—that’s a—that’s a difficult question to answer.” It should be difficult to answer when one considers that the migrant children separated from their parents are physically, emotionally, and sexually abused; starved; dehydrated; underclothed in bitterly cold temperatures; drugged against their will; restrained; and lacking even the toys and other personal belongs that they had brought to the border. When Hirono asked Albence the same question, he sputtered “Again, I think we’re—we’re missing the point.”

At Albence’s “summer camps” in Arizona, two youth care workers were charged with sexually assaulting immigrant teenagers in the most recent claims of abuse at the privatized “shelters” for children taken from their parents at the Mexico border. One of the ex-workers, who is HIV positive, tried to get boys to anally penetrate him. Both centers are operated by the Texas company Southwest Key Programs that received almost $1 billion in taxpayer money to provide services to immigrant children. Allegations against the worker were first reported to Mesa Police Department over a year ago. The other man charged worked at a migrant center that Melania Trump visited.

Another federal contractor kept children in a Phoenix vacant office building until a neighbor reported that she saw ICE taking children into the building. The state failed to take any action about the children being kept in substandard conditions, claiming that the contractor MVM didn’t need a day care license, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. The contractor canceled its lease after city inspectors tried to visit the building five times in one week. MVM, which does not contract for providing shelters, eventually admitted that it lied about not keeping children in the building as a short-term shelter but stated that it “provided notice to both ICE and Arizona officials about the use of this building” and that “ICE approved such use.”

A federal judge has ordered the federal government not to give psychotropic medication to migrant children at Shiloh Residential Treatment Center in Manvel (TX) without parents’ or guardians’ consent except in dire emergencies. She also ordered all children moved out of the facility except for those diagnosed as “risk of harm” to themselves or others by a licensed professional. Government officials denied that medications were only on “an emergency basis,” but children gave testimony that they were given pills “every morning and every night.” Some were forcibly injected with drugs. They suffered nausea, dizziness, depression, and weight gain. The doctor prescribing the drugs lacked board certification for child and adolescent treatment for almost ten years. Shiloh also has a history of other child abuse.

The families designated for reunification faced chaotic situations. Some children in New York were driven from one airport to another to find lights. Mayor Bill de Blasio said that about 100 children remain in New York, “with no end in sight.” Some parents defined as “released” stayed in custody for up to a week with no access to showers, phones, or religious services. Some returned children are sick and beaten, and one child even died soon after she was returned. Others were taken places with no one waiting because parents were deported. Volunteer groups frantically raised funds to help children and parents who were just dropped off with no food or ways to communicate with anyone. Families are afraid to line up for help because the separation happened after promises of assistance to them. Some parents waived rights to be reunified because they could not read the consent form and were told that they could see their children if they signed the form. Even with reunification, some children don’t recognize their parents because they were separated for so long, and others are terrified that the government will take them from their parents again.

The biggest dodge to claim “mission accomplished” for a federal judge were the parents who DHS regarded as “either not eligible, or not yet known to be eligible, for reunification.” Of these, 64 were considered criminals, an overly broad classification because some of them had not been convicted of a crime. Crimes might be a DUI or simply “wanted in El Salvador.” Another 463 parents were “not in the U.S.,” with 411 probably deported. As for the 260 parents requiring “further evaluation,” the government lawyer tried to explain that among those 260 parents, some had already been released from immigration detention and couldn’t be found. Others are children already released to non-parent families in the U.S.

Conservatives praised U.S. agencies for how hard they worked to reunify families. The only reason that they had to manually go through 12,000 records instead of “at the stroke of keystrokes … within seconds,” as HHS Secretary Alex Azar bragged about his ability to “find any child within our care for any parent,” is that not one of the three agencies in charge had any system for returning children to the parents. Azar made that statement in June; he’s been very quiet since then. DDT’s administration never intended to reunify families, and the court ruling requiring them to put migrant children back with their parents came as a shock to them. This article describes the problems and the processes.

Scott Lloyd, a DDT appointment to lead the Office of Refugee Resettlement, set up a roadblock to reunification with his demand that he personally review each request to release migrant children. He made that decision without any agency review and changed it only after the policy was stopped by an injunction last month after a lawsuit challenged Lloyd’s policy. Children are incarcerated for months waiting for him to personally sign releases. In one case, he claimed a 17-year-old boy was a gang member with no proof; the boy lacked the tattoos that Lloyd claimed he saw. He became infamous when he unconstitutionally blocked an abortion for a raped teenage girl and other undocumented teenage girls. His experience for the current job was as a policy worker with the Knights of Columbus that involved research and advocacy for Christians persecuted in Iraq.

To permanently conceal ICE crimes, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) approved ICE’s request to destroy its records related to in-custody deaths, sexual assault, and solitary confinement. ICE also lists only 112 facilities although 203 have been identified. Since January, ICE stripped away due process, privatized detention services to deadly companies, collaborated with local law enforcement to racially target people, gone after domestic abuse victims, doctored documents to detain protected immigrants, and used children as bait to arrest their parents.

Many conservatives, led by the Fox network, consistently minimize the pain of immigrants. Pundits such as Laura Ingraham talk about the “phony concern for the children” by the left. Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends, said, “These aren’t our kids…. It’s not like [DDT] is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas.” According to a recent study, people watching Fox and/or reading Breitbart are more likely to support child/family separation. On The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, Ann Coulter accused separated migrant children of being “child actors weeping and crying … being coached, … given scripts to read by liberals.” The same accusation was given for gun safety activists from Parkland (FL).

Conservatives are accused of having “no heart.” It’s not true: conservatives have heart but just for a highly limited number of people within their own small tribe that looks exactly like them—namely white for U.S. conservatives. That’s why they can subscribe to genocide. We’re up past Step 8 (above) in the United States.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) failed its deadline to reunite all 102 children under the age of five with their parents. Officials supposedly succeeded in only 38 cases by the deadline although that number cannot be confirmed. The government now maintains that half of the separated children under five years of age should not be reunited with their parents.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar claimed that the children are not being reunited because the adults are not their parents, but immigration lawyer Barbara Hines reported that many parents who have birth certificates and other documents proving parentage are denied their children. A dozen children were not united because their parents were voluntarily deported, but the parents have said that they were told they would get their children back if they signed papers to leave the country. One father said he didn’t understand the paperwork he signed to leave his child in the United States. Reports indicate that HHS is not searching for deported parents.

The next deadline is July 26—two weeks from now—when the remainder of the approximately 3,000 youth, many of them as young as five years old, must be returned to their parents. Judge Dana Sabraw repeated that her deadlines are firm—“not aspirational goals.” She has asked the ACLU to “submit a proposal for possible punishment.” Officials are facing an almost impossible task: they admitted that they didn’t set up any systems to reunify parents with children.

Azar said that the U.S. is acting “generously” toward these children torn from their parents with only a few returned after a court order. He said:

“It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally.”

He explained that “we could put children back with individuals who are murderers, kidnappers, rapists or are not their parents” and added that he “could release all of the kids by 10:55 p.m., but I don’t think you want that.” Azar ignored the fact that the government doesn’t know how to find many of the parents.

Politico is painting Azar as the victim in the fiasco by saying that the man who lacks records for parents of 3,000 separated children was “pilloried on cable TV” while “he’s working through a thicket of court orders and red tape.” Author Dan Diamond criticizes the debacle for taking Azar’s time “from other priorities, such as lowering drug costs and helping solve the opioid epidemic.” An HHS official said about Azar, “He didn’t want the job.” Diamond described Azar as “a proven problem-solver … at drug giant Eli Lilly.” At this time, Azar is escaping much criticism from the mercurial DDT because publicity has focused on DDT’s vendetta against Europe, but failure to return the rest of the children within the next few days will bring the subject back to the media forefront.

Azar is now allowing his agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement to funnel funding into the reunification project from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which is intended to provide “a comprehensive system of care that includes primary medical care and essential support services for people living with HIV who are uninsured or underinsured.” He also took more from social services, medical assistance, and English language instructions for refugee resettlement. ORR, which had a $1.3 billion for the entire year is asking for an additional $1.3 billion for the last three months of 2018. The average stay of migrant minors in federal custody is now 55 days, with longer stays anticipated as ORR shifts away from its mission for short-term care to keeping children for much longer times.

Separating migrant children from their parents is great business for DDT’s donors who make $1 billion annually. Grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children rose from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. Over 11,800 children from a few months old to 17 years are kept in almost 90 facilities in 17 states. HHS requested bids in May of over $500 million for beds, foster and therapeutic care, and “secure care” (aka guards). which means employing guards. More contracts are expected to come up for bids in October.

The latest attack on immigrants is in the military that is discharging legal immigrants with no justification. For example, Panshu Zhao finished a graduate degree and is working on a doctorate in geography at Texas A&M. He joined the military under a special program promising a faster path to citizenship. After waiting for years to be cleared for duty and accepted, he like many others, has been declared ineligible to serve. While the Army has a shortage of recruits and farmers need workers, DDT is throwing out some of the best, keeping workers for himself. He’s getting another 78 immigrant workers for Mar-a-Lago. At three DDT properties in New York, only one of 144 jobs went to a U.S. worker; the remainder went to foreign guest workers.

Infants and toddlers must appear in immigration court to defend themselves. A one-year-old boy in federal custody whose father has already been returned to Honduras appeared in an Arizona court without parents. He drank from a bottle and “cried hysterically” before he left the courtroom before a judge overrode federal officials to send the baby back to his father. Officials argued that they shouldn’t be required to reunite children with deported parents. Judge John Richardson said he was “embarrassed to ask” the baby if he understood the proceedings, a DOJ requirement. Another boy held up five fingers when he was asked his age. These children cannot even see over the defense tables, and their feet don’t touch the floor.

Children have had to appear in courts located in California, Arizona, Texas, and Washington, D.C. The government is not required to provide legal representation to undocumented children and adults. A National Review column accused Michael Moore of lying about the situation when he said that these toddlers “cannot” have a lawyer. They “can” have a lawyer or adult; they are even permitted to ask for someone from a list of legal services organizations. Just imagine a three-year-old being given this list and then calling one of them.

In 2016, senior Department of Justice immigration Judge Jack Weil insisted in a federal court deposition that he can teach three- and four-year-olds to be knowledgeable about immigration law and represent themselves in court. He said,

“You can do a fair hearing. It’s going to take you a lot of time.”

[Employees throughout the nation are complaining that they cannot find trained workers. Weil might be able to teach three- and four-year-olds to fill these slots.]

Unable to reunite many of the kidnapped migrant children with their parents, DDT’s administration is threatening to resume the separation if parents in detention don’t waive their children’s right to release. A judge told DDT he couldn’t indefinitely detain children with parents awaiting deportation proceedings, because of the 1997 Flores legal settlement permitting children to be detained for no longer than 20 days. ICE doesn’t want to release families so they may continue to blackmail parents with the threat of separating them from their children if they don’t waive the child’s right for release. Separated children would then be classified as apprehended without their parents and put in HHS custody.

Paula White, chair of DDT’s Evangelical Advisory Board, has been excoriating the “law-breaking” immigrants while defending Jesus, who she says never broke the law. She said:

“Yes, he did live in Egypt for three-and-a-half years, but it was not illegal. If he had broken the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah.”

Jesus was crucified because he broke the law by claiming to be the son of God, resting on the Sabbath, and driving money changers out of the Temple with “a whip of cords,” among other actions. White called the separated children’s experiences in the camps as “life-changing”:

Newspaper articles refute White’s rosy view of the happy life in these camps. Reports show neglect and sexual and physical abuse in facilities for separated and unaccompanied children that are run by private companies with deficiencies and citations in the hundreds. Southwest Key, which took in almost $1 billion in three years, had 246 violations that include lack of medical attention and “inappropriate contact” between children and staff. In early 2017, when DDT was inaugurated, Southwest Keys facilities had laid off workers and closed some shelters because they were under capacity. Now their 16 Texas shelters receive variances to hold up to 150 percent of their licensed capacity. Juan Sanchez, the company’s CEO and president, makes at least $1.5 million which puts him one of the top five highest-paid nonprofit CEOs in the U.S., despite the company’s 246 violations in three years.

In some places, children have died after the staff restrained them. Only one of the facilities was closed after the deaths which were ruled homicides. Children are also controlled through psychotropic drugs. In a faith-based nonprofit home, a court-ordered guardian reported that “caregivers sometimes have sex with each other while on duty.” Some foster homes have unsupervised firearms lying around. Some cited facilities merely change their names to get more grants. The grim stories continue in “shelters” where federal officials continue to send children after they know about the citations.

The DHS Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has changed its mission: gone are the words “providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship.”

On his visit to the Middle East, Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) told the world that the United States shared values with Saudi Arabia. Now its King Abdullah will define atheists as terrorists to continue the nation’s repressive laws on political dissent and protests that it claims can “harm public order.” Royal Decree 44 criminalizes “participating in hostilities outside the kingdom” with prison sentences of between three and 20 years. Article One of the new provisions defines terrorism as “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.”

Saudi money is being sent to Europe to create its fanatical version of Islam throughout Germany. Instead of moderate Islamism, the push is toward the Wahhabi supremacy of Sharia law and use of violent jihad and takfirism to kill Muslims not following the Saudi interpretation of Islam. Almost all terrorist attacks in the West are connected to Saudi Arabia with almost none to Iran, excoriated by DDT.

Those who think that this idea can never move to the United States need to realize that DDT will do anything to pander to his base of evangelicals and VP Mike Pence is a “Christian” first. One of his leaders, Pat Robertson, has called for parents to beat non-Christian children if they don’t respect Christian beliefs. On his television program he told a woman upset because her grandchildren don’t follow her beliefs to “take that kid to the woodshed and let him understand the blessings of discipline.” He further told the women that the grandson would go to prison if a “strong male figure” doesn’t give him that “discipline.” Robertson advised before predicting that the kid would end up in prison if a strong male figure didn’t start beating him right away.

Robertson’s form of child abuse follows Glenn Beck’s call four years ago to physically abuse children until they believe in God. Two years before that, fundamentalist Christian parents beat their nine children in the name of God and killed one of them. Across the country “Christians” are following the advice of Robertson and Beck. Robertson’s solution of child abuse is against the law if it results in physical harm or death–at least for now.

Religious Right activist “Coach” Dave Daubenmire (right) is calling for “a more violent Christianity” and gave DDT and Greg Gianforte as examples of men who are properly “walking in authority.” Gianforte is the new Montana U.S. representative who threw a reporter to the floor and continued to attack him the night before his successful election. Daubenmire played a clip of DDT shoving another world leader aside at the NATO summit to show that DDT “is large and in charge.” He added about DDT, “He just spanked them all.” Daubenmire said, “That should be the heart cry of Christian men. From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of God has suffered violence and violent men take it by force.”

Kentucky’s governor, Matt Bevin thinks he can solve the problem of community violence in Louisville through prayer. His plan is to send roaming prayer groups to needy areas that will walk around and pray with people two or three times a week for the next year. Bevin thinks that prayer can take away the need for investment in housing, education, and health care.

In late May, Mike Huckabee, former presidential candidate and father of White House communication staffer Sarah Sanders, joined 5,000 Israeli settlers with an armed guard to perform religious rituals at Joseph’s Tomb in Palestine’s West Bank. With him was Israeli Parliament member Bezalel Smotrich who wants to murder all Palestinians who refuse to admit their inferior status. Later Huckabee met with parliament member Yehudah Glick, called “the most dangerous man in the Middle East” by Israeli police. Glick’s goal is to bulldoze an Islamic holy site and build a Jewish temple in its place before creating a theocracy over all residents in the Holy Land.

According to Calvinist evangelicals, wealth is a sign of God’s approval, a reason that they consider DDT to be God’s anointed. Some people are just destined to accumulate material things, at the expense of others, while others are simply relegated to a far lower place. Combined with fundamentalist reverence for authoritarianism, DDT had the characteristics for the evangelical leader.

In his campaigning, DDT promised Christians that they would not be persecuted if he became president. The GOP has used the persecution myth for decades, but DDT sold it to them to get elected. Now women are being persecuted with the Christian law of the United States. DDT appointed Charmaine Yoest, the former president of an anti-abortion group, to lead public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. He followed that egrigious choice a few weeks later by naming another anti-abortion advocate to oversee the Title X program with the responsibility of allocating $300 million a year in family planning funds for low-income people. Teresa Manning is also in charge of shaping policy and regulation about contraception and teen pregnancy. Her philosophy that family planning is only among “a husband and a wife and God.” She also thinks that contraception doesn’t prevent pregnancy but instead increases the number of abortions. She said, “The prospect that contraception would always prevent the conception of a child is preposterous.”

The past decade has seen increasingly abusive laws for women seeking abortions, and DDT has moved on to controlling contraception for women. DDT’s executive order about eliminating the health care birth control mandate hasn’t appeared yet, but leaks have provided an idea of its direction. If he signs the existing draft, any employee can declare a “belief” reason to stop providing free contraception through their insurance plans. Because of “Obamacare,” teen pregnancy has hit an historic low.

DDT claims that women can get contraceptives from a family member’s health plan, buy separate insurance for them, or use “multiple other federal programs that provide free or subsidized contraceptives.” He didn’t specify which ones because he also wants to close down Planned Parenthood in exchange for “crisis pregnancy centers” that don’t provide contraceptives. Losing Planned Parenthood will leave almost 1.6 million low-income patients with no family planning care—and maybe no insurance if employees deny them. DDT also wants to largely defund Medicaid, another source for contraception for low-income women. Any DDT order would be immediate with no public comment because he would declare it an interim final rule because employers need immediate relief. Any DDT order would be immediate with no public comment because he would declare it an interim final rule because employers need immediate relief.

Before the removal of contraception came DDT’s executive order protection of “religious liberty,” removing constitutional rights of others. An example is hospitals which can deny services, fire people on a Christian basis, and refuse federally-mandated retirement regulations and disclosures through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. An example of religious firing was an employee at a faith-based addition center in Missoula (MT) because she didn’t pray hard enough.

The U.S. is already one of the most extreme fundamentalist religious countries in the world, according to scholar Noam Chomsky. Over 42 percent of the people in this country think that the world was created 10,000 years ago by the hand of God, and these people are a political force, controlling others with their beliefs and fear-mongering. The problems of the nation come from income inequality inculcated by huge corporations, but the DDT supporters blame anyone who isn’t white. Yes, the United States shares values with Saudi Arabia, basing its laws on religion and calling for physical punishment. The question is how far the pendulum will swing to the right before it returns—if it ever does.

After over seven years in office, President Obama has decided not to include abstinence-only education programs in his budget. Ronald Reagan began in 1981 to fund these programs that are proved to be failures, and funding “grew exponentially” between 1996 and 2006. In 25 years, taxpayers have been forced to pay over $1.5 billion for these failed programs. One survey showed the doubling of participants in one type of this program who would “probably” have sex during high school. Teen pregnancy has steadily declined in states that require comprehensive-sex education while teen pregnancy in states where abstinence-only sex education is allowed and even mandated stays high.

States with the highest rate of teen pregnancies are New Mexico, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma—places that mandate sex-education programs stress abstinence and “the importance of sex only during marriage.”New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Maine had the lowest numbers of teen pregnancies in the nation during the same time. Teen pregnancy costs the U.S. about $9.4 billion in 2010.

Unlike the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts have long refused to engage in bigotry, a policy that occasionally makes them the target of conservative religious groups. The most recent event comes from a Missouri Catholic archdiocese when St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson urged priests to sever all ties with Girl Scout troops, accusing them of “exhibiting a troubling pattern of behavior.” A week later the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri had raised a record amount of money at its annual fundraiser—over $350,000. In addition, increased sales of Girl Scout cookies has caused shortages, and several local businesses offered to host cookie booths in their lobbies.

In a possible lessening of Catholic anti-contraception position, Pope Francis said that its use in avoiding infecting fetuses with the Zika virus is better than abortions. He said, “Avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil.” For example, Pope Paul VI permitted African raped nuns to use contraception. The Catholic church’s position on preventing contraception does not hold up in Latin America: 88 percent of Mexicans, 91 percent of Colombians, and 93 percent of Brazilians support the use of contraceptives. Francis also said that Catholic lawmakers are free to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions in opposition to Pope Benedict XVI’s document in 2003 when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger that explicitly forbid Catholic legislators from voting for same-sex marriage or unions.

Bad:

Good news, bad news. Idaho is getting rid of a law mandating daily Bible readings in schools while allowing Bibles to be used in school classes—including science.

The Rev. Dwight C. Jones, mayor of Richmond (VA), thinks that the First Amendment protects him as he hires people from his church to do volunteer work for the church while being paid by the state’s capital city. Over ten percent of Richmond’s executive-level positions were filled by members of Jones’ church, First Baptist of South Richmond. Head of public works for Richmond, Emmanuel Adediran, was discovered supervising renovation work for First Baptist while on his city’s job. Two contractors also listed Richmond city offices as the billing address for estimates on kitchen equipment for the church. One employee has already been fired, but more are in the pipeline. Jones is asking for respect “for the wall of separation between church and state.”

Many Christians who fear Sharia Law in the U.S. support Christian Law. GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz is one of those according to his wife, Heidi. She claims that her husband is the only one able to provide a “combination of the law and religion.” According to Heidi Cruz, “the God of Christianity is the God of freedom, of individual liberty, of choice and of consequence.” She also calls Christians “loving” and “nonjudgmental”–the same ones who want to take away rights from people. Cruz is running on a platform that rights in the United States come from God and talks about “Christianity under attack.” He openly supports torture, carpet bombing, distribution of water in Flint only to anti-abortion religious centers, and has connections to which supremacy groups.

GOP presidential candidate John Kasich, who claims to be “small government,” goes beyond pushing Christianity through the United States. He wants an agency to make Christians out of everyone in the world. His proposed tax-payer funded agency would “beam messages around the world about what it means to have a western ethic, to be part of a Judeo-Christian society.” In many ways, Kasich is as dangerous as his GOP competition, but the media gives him as pass as a “moderate Republican.”

Ugly:

God has declared that domestic violence abusers should have the “freedom” to “open carry” guns in order to protect themselves, according to Rep. Jeff Coody in his defense of an Oklahoma bill that passed the House by a large majority. When Rep. Mike Brown asked if the government had a responsibility to protect other people, Coody said, “No.” Since the state passed a concealed carry law, it is at a 10-year high for rapes. This bill also removes any requirement for permits or training before people can buy guns. “If we give people some freedom, people tend to use that responsibly,” Coody said.

Proving that “religious liberty” is only for Christians, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is furious that President Obama has blocked the sale of a San Carlos Apache sacred site to foreign-owned Resolution Copper. He justifies his actions by alleging that the place has never been sacred, despite testimony from Scientists for the Society for American Archaeology the site has been used for religious purposes since “well before recorded history.” The area had been closed to mining since then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s recognition of the sacred land in 1955. Tribe members have occupied the site since it was sold out to the mining company according to a provision in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act. The sale would mark the first time in history that Native American land would be handed over to foreign interests by Congress.

Just when people thought that the Catholic Church might try to stop child sexual abuse, the church has delivered a different message. The guidelines for training newly ordained bishops state:

“According to the state of civil laws of each country where reporting is obligatory, it is not necessarily the duty of the bishop to report suspects to authorities, the police or state prosecutors in the moment when they are made aware of crimes or sinful deeds.”

This directive ignores the pope’s statement that “everything possible must be done to rid the church of the scourge of the sexual abuse.”

“Girls are like apples on trees. Their fathers are the farmers, whose job is to care for them. He must protect his apples from pests and disease. He must guard them against thieves who may pick his apples prematurely. Neither those at the top nor those at the bottom can help their location. But, when each reaches peak ripeness, it is the farmer’s job to harvest that fruit and give it to whom he will, to those in need. So there is nothing wrong with the apples still on the tree and nothing wrong with the boys who seek them. But it is the farmer’s duty to provide for both, in due season.”

That comes from Vaughn Ohlman, who thinks that Christian youth aren’t marrying early enough because fathers are too selective about which “boys” they give their “girls” to in marriage. According to Suzanne Titkemeyer, Ohlman is upset because he wanted a girl in his church and the father wouldn’t “give” her to Ohlman.

Mass shootings have increased within the past few weeks across the nation, but the GOP refuses to take any actions for prevention. Their solution is prayer. Several months ago, the president said, “[T]houghts and prayers are not enough…. It does … nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America, next week or a couple of months from now.” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) responded, “When you are praying, you are doing something about it. You are revealing the presence of God…. That is why prayer should always come first.” No comment on what should come next. For Christian Republicans, solutions are denial and prayer while giving all the resources in the nation to the wealthiest people. This would be worsen under a fundamentalist Christian president.